Social media’s purposes go beyond than just allowing you to upload pictures of your latest adventures or tell your friends what you have been doing recently. Right now, online platforms like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are not just for personal use anymore but for marketing too.
In fact, it has become a powerful and measurable tool providing many businesses, especially small to medium enterprises (or SMEs), a place on the World Wide Web.
Just how far is the reach of social media? Check out these facts to know.
- As of 2012, Facebook has more than 900 million active users. If it were a country, it would have been the third largest in the entire world.
- On average, a user spends around 11-12 minutes on the site.
- Facebook generates approximately 2.7 billion “Likes” daily.
- As of 2012, the average number of tweets for every second is 16,000.
- The top three nations with the most Twitter accounts are the U.S., Brazil, and Japan.
- Many users retweet because of interesting content, personal connection, and humour (in this order).
- As of 2012, Google+ has an estimated 170 million users.
- Many users serve the Google +1 button over 5 billion times in a day.
- Pinterest, which is similar to a social pin board but virtual, allows its members to link to products or gather images that they wish to share.
- It has more than 10 million users with 9 million connecting to Facebook each month.
Now, these are not the only interesting insights you have to know about social platforms. You would probably have to go through several pages to learn all the fantastic things about the biggest media sites today.
With that said, it only goes to show the great relevance of social media to businesses.
So, what are its benefits?
BRANDING
If you wish to build more exposure for your brand, networking is an ideal solution given that millions of individuals are registered users. And, whether there is engagement or not, imagine a big percentage of these people seeing your trademark on their profiles.
If you combine social media with effective marketing and advertising strategies, you can increase brand awareness among your target customers.
MARKETING
In the past, many advertisers and companies used display and print adverts (e.g. banner stands, billboards, flyers, etc.) to advertise their offers. After some time, they added these with online means such as pop-up ads, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and search engine optimisation (SEO). Then, came social networking and they started to include it in their campaign.
If you want to convey your sales pitch to a global market, do it on your social profiles. You can even invest in a professional Web developer for assistance in website or blog site development and design. This way, you can create relevant content for linking to your networking pages.
EXPOSURE AND REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
While you can build a credible name through the press, you can increase higher visibility and authority through social media. The main reason for this is that other users will become aware of your business. Eventually, they will talk about your company and possibly share the information they have learned to their own group.
Given this insight, you can use it to your advantage by finding out what your target customers have to say about your offers. Since everyone has the right to express their opinions, you will get varied remarks (both positive and negative) allowing you to come up with better strategies.
CUSTOMER SERVICE BOOST
Given that many consumers have social profiles and are constantly online these days, there is no doubt that they will air their concerns, enquiries, or remarks about your services or products on your page.
In this case, you can use commenting as a means of providing consumer support. Though, as a note, you have to respond accordingly. For instance, you can show appreciation to users praising your brand. On the other hand, you can state your side of the story whenever you receive negative feedback.
LEAD GENERATION
Social media helps you find the right customers, especially if you know how to engage through your profile pages. You can maximise your market reach by combining most social activities with SEO. For example, you can tweet or post a status update integrated with relevant keywords, so you can rank in search engine results whenever users look for offers within your industry.
MARKET ANALYSIS
Since you need to keep up with competitors, social networking allows you to study their methods easily. This is possible given the transparency of conversations and content on the profile pages of most companies.
STEADY STREAM OF INFORMATION
Social platforms serve as your free sources of insight about your target market, competition, related industry, and internal affairs. This benefit keeps you informed all the time allowing you to remain innovative, especially when it comes to keeping your customers engaged to your offers.
There you have it. These are the biggest rewards of creating social profiles for your brand or company.
Basing on these insights, you can see that joining network sites is an inexpensive means of reaching out to your target audience within a short duration.
So, if you do not have a business page yet, start making one on the biggest sites. This way, you can build exposure through social media buzz.
Navin
Hi I'm Navin owner of TechInfo Blog. I usually write about WordPress, SEO and Technology updates on this blog. Connect me: Twitter @navinshettyy Google Plus: Circle me.
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Social media is important to everyone, not just to smes. But especially for small businesses it is a great and cheap way to make the first hundred dollars that will be spend to make it better.